Design a top-level makefile to compile a dependency

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I am trying to design a makefile that will invoke the configure script and then make the library. The commands to build the library are:
./configure <options>
make

What I have tried:

So far I have been piecing the makefile together and have:

$(Name):nettle
.PHONY: nettle
$(Make) --directory=path/to/lib/

Where Name is the name of the top-level application that is dependent on the Nettle library. I'm not sure how to go about using Make to perform the configure which, builds the makefile in the library.

Posted 4-Nov-20 13:21pm

jblixt

Updated 5-Nov-20 5:09am

v3

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Richard MacCutchan 5-Nov-20 4:08am

It is a long time since I have written make files, but you should be able to use the ./configure command as part of the set of commands for a target. Something like:

targetname:
    ./configure
    make makefilename

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k5054 · Accepted Answer · 2020-11-05T05:10:00

Be aware that configure generally produces a Makefile, so don't use that as your "meta" makefile name. Since this would appear to be a Linux project, you are probably using GNU make, which searches for "GNUmakefile", "makefile" and "Makefile" in that order, so you probably don't want to use those, either.

As far as I know, there's no way to pass option flags to make targets, but GNU make can access global shell variables so you can do something like this:

myMakefile:

CONFOPTS = --prefix=$(HOME)/lib --with-opt-a --with-opt-b

ifdef OPTFOO
    CONFOPTS += --foo=$(OPTFOO)
endif

ifdef OPTBAR
    CONFOPTS += --bar=$(OPTBAR)
endif

mylib:   # as per Ricard, above
     ./configure $(CONFOPTS)
     make

Then you would invoke this as
make -f myMakefile OPTfOO=blah OPTBAR=all